fications, that give a right in an inverse
proportion to the possession of them.

In this whole contrivance of the three bases, consider it in any light
you please, I do not see a variety of objects reconciled in one
consistent whole, but several contradictory principles reluctantly and
irreconcilably brought and held together by your philosophers, like wild
beasts shut up in a cage, to claw and bite each other to their mutual
destruction.

I am afraid I have gone too far into their way of considering the
formation of a Constitution. They have much, but bad,
metaphysics,--much, but bad, geometry,--much, but false, proportionate
arithmetic; but if it were all as exact as metaphysics, geometry, and
arithmetic ought to be, and if their schemes were perfectly consistent
in all their parts, it would make only a more fair and sightly vision.
It is remarkable, that, in a great arrangement of mankind, not one
reference whatsoever is to be found to anything moral or anything
politic,--nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the
passions, the interests of men. _Hominem non sapiunt_.

You see I only consider this Constitution as electoral, and leading by
steps to the National Assembly. I do not enter into the internal
government of the departments, and their genealogy through the communes
and cantons. These local governments are, in the original plan, to be as
nearly as possible composed in the same manner and on the same
principles with the elective assemblies. They are each of them bodies
perfectly compact and rounded in themselves.

You cannot but perceive in this scheme, that it has a direct and
immediate tendency to sever France into a variety of republics, and to
render them totally independent of each other, without any direct
constitutional means of coherence, connection, or subordination, except
what may be derived from their acquiescence in the determinations of the
general congress of the ambassadors from each independent republic. Such
in reality is the National Assembly; and such governments, I admit, do
exist in the world, though, in forms infinitely more suitable to the
local and habitual circumstances of their people. But such associations,
rather than bodies politic, have generally been the effect of necessity,
not choice; and I believe the present French power is the very first
body of citizens who, having obtained full authority to do with their
country what they pleased, have chosen to dissever i